Though my background is primarily on the software side, I am very curious about the effects that different processor designs and features have on system performance. Being somewhat less knowledgeable about CPU architecture than many others, I have been looking for some way to see these effects in a concrete manner. Benchmarks are supposed to provide this ‘visible’ evidence, but there are probably as many different application mixes and workloads as there are users. This isn’t a problem for a corporation that has the money to spend to evaluate how their applications and workloads will perform on a given platform – but the average user, such as myself, is left wondering what these benchmarks are really measuring so they can be applied to our own usage.

Recently released benchmarks for the new Pentium 4 processor look disappointing – but is it really a slug or a sleeper? Paul DeMone takes a close look at the SPEC numbers to divine the processor’s potential.

This is the second of a two-part series in which Paul DeMone dissects the upcoming Willamette processor from Intel. In this installment Paul looks at the trace cache and ALU in detail, and speculates on what the performance might be.